Monday, 18 October 2010

Lynn Angell: The Strange Recurring Anecdote

On a recent ski trip, she told a group of her women friends, myself included, a painful story that she rarely talked about. It was 1964, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, and there was talk of an attempt to integrate the white churches. Fifteen-year-old Lynn Edwards set off for church one Sunday with her parents and her brother Tom, and as they walked up to the church, they watched as a black family, dressed for church, approached the front steps. The black family was met by a phalanx of grim church leaders, who turned them away. Lynn ceased to be a Southerner that day, and 36 years later, when she told us this story, she wept with the same sadness and rage she felt back then [emphasis added].

For Lynn, a passion for serving others was also forged in church. As a young girl coming of age in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement, "She stood on the street outside our church," Lynn’s brother Tom recalls, "watching a black family trying to attend services and being turned away. That seemed incongruous to her and unfair." Recounting this story even decades later, Tom says, "she wept with the same sadness and rage she felt back then [emphasis added]." From these early experiences, both David and Lynn developed deeply principled commitments to social justice.

The first article was written by Colleen Dunn Bates, who provided us with the faked "Lynn Angell in a tiara" image analysed in an earlier post. She claims to have written this article on the 20th September 2001 for the Writer's Guild of America website. The original article no longer exists on this site, although it can be found in the archives of http://www.web.archive.org in the December issue of the Guild's on-line publication. This is curious indeed, because The Angell Foundation simply didn't exist in its current form back in 2001 and I find it highly unlikely that two separate sources (one a friend, the other Lynn's brother) managed to produce two identical anecdotes (word for word in one key area) in complete isolation.

In saying this, I'm certainly not implying that Colleen's article is original and authentic and that The Angell Foundation simply borrowed from it. In fact, it seems to me that Colleen was, and still is, working from a 'script'. I can say this with some certainty, for the simple reason that her 'original' article provides three additional pictures of Lynn Angell, all of which are just as fake as the image that appears alongside the article's 2010 reissue on the http://www.hometown-pasadena.com/ website. Accordingly, there's absolutely no reason to regard the story itself as any more authentic than the images. The fact that this anecdote subsequently appeared on The Angell Foundation's website supports my contention that the parties involved are working to a script that backstops the 'lives' of David and Lynn Angell. Who wrote the script, and for what purpose, is moot at this stage.

If anybody comes across any additional examples of this anecdote then please email me and I'll add it to the list with an appropriate credit: firemansam@operamail.com